Month: June 2016

For a long while I’ve listened to a podcast called The Heart. It’s always been a fun and well produced podcast to listen to. Recently, however, they embarked on a long form story called “Silent Evidence” about a woman who was abused when she was 6. It was a change of pace for the podcast but I gave it a shot anyway. I’m now on the final episode and I have to say that it’s been a really worthwhile experience. Kind of like Serial was last year, this long form story has been frustrating and difficult and interesting and I am really glad I stumbled on to it.
It deserves to be listened to. You can stream it online and learn more here, or you can subscribe to the podcast here. Do it.

Two days and three years ago, the first of many articles revealing NSA led domestic spying appeared in the Guardian. They were written by Glenn Greenwald and of course they were sourced by the incredible cache of documents provided by the whistleblower Edward Snowden. The full magnitude of revelations provided by that leak was and still is enormous. We are still today processing what our government has been doing in the name of protecting us from ‘terrorism’.

I was following the Guardian stories closely when they dropped and have always been trying to pay attention to the surveillance state in our country (here’s a piece from 10 years ago) but even I was surprised to find a lot of things in the book that I wasn’t aware of. As I read I was just dumfounded at the things the NSA and FBI were/are doing and how most of the companies we rely on everyday to communicate have been cooperating and how our media has been actively keeping quiet about things. I was further surprised to learn that this behavior is not new (post 2001) but has been going on for almost a century (with the reading of domestic telegrams in the 30s for example).

Greenwald does more than simply lay out what was in the leak. He takes his time to present other sources to support some very strong arguments about how dangerous this surveillance is to our democracy and how the media is not helping things at all. It’s just a really important book and it’s exceptionally well written and clear.
As an American citizen you owe it to yourself and your country to make yourself aware of what is going on in your country. This book isn’t filled with conspiracy theories, it’s filled with very well laid out and clear hard evidence. Read it!